Player and guild name registration is live now

Source from:http://www.wscredits.com/news/game-WildStar-1614/Player-and-guild-name-registration-is-live-now-11632
Starting today, all pre-order players will be able to reserve one guild name and one player name through our Player and Guild Name Registration page. This perk will only be available through May 23rd at 11:59 AM PDT. This is first-come, first-served, so be sure to reserve your name early!



If you have any questions about the reservation process, including server selection and name guidelines, take a look at our FAQ section on the Player and Guild Name Registration page.

Haven't pre-ordered WildStar yet but want to make sure your name is waiting for you at launch? It's not too late! Go to the WildStar store and pick up either the Standard or Deluxe edition. Both grant you the same pre-order benefits, including Player and Guild Name Reservation, as well as the pre-order exclusive in-game rocket house, 3-day head start, and more!

What makes players so immersed in Wildstar

Source from:http://www.wscredits.com/news/game-WildStar-1614/What-makes-players-so-immersed-in-Wildstar-11639
Kenosos:"I had a similar issue, which I fixed, this might seem odd but what sorted it for me was adjusting the field of view.
The default field of view is 50 which is very low, it makes everything seem like it lacks any depth ie: very flat.
I used this addon CustomFoV and set it to 75 which made my experience a lot more enjoyable.
Edit: Also I thought I should add, I set my gamma to 1.4 which lessened the strain on my eyes that seemed to come with all the bright colours, could also help lessen stuff 'blending together'."




Meatnoodles:"That's actually one of the things i like the most about Wildstar. The fact that all the enviroment, creatures, buildings, npcs, etc, everything look and feel as a cohesive whole instead of just NPCs placed on a open field. Making me feel like im trully on a wild planet i have to explore. Wildstar is a new IP, a new story, but Carbine has done such a great job developing this world that i feel attached to it already. Not as much as i feel attached to some of WoW's characters tho, but that will come with time, since i think the main fact i love some of WoWs NPCs is because ive been "living" with them for such a long time, they feel like family. But i do get your point, immersion happens in different ways to some people. I do wish Carbine would make more use of voice acting and cutscenes. At least on the main characters and main story. As that add more to feeling attached to the characters. Doesn't need to be like SWTOR or ESO, where everything is voice acted, but main characters and main quest line would be great, like WoW does."

Gracepark:"It throws too much at you at once, not giving you any sense of importance or priority. You get tens of quests at a time. Killing 30 mobs per quest, accepting challenges and collecting items nonstop. Your quests have bulletpoint headings superimposed on text bubbles that appear during oneliner voice acting. Your brain is always acutely aware that you're playing a game, because it's having to manage all the games information.
Even the colourscheme is highly saturated, resulting in nothing in particular standing out.
Wildstar is to immersion what Gallagher is to subtlety.
Wildstar, for example, states they've taken the "ui game" out off mmo. No they haven't. You're still playing mini games each fight. Instead of the mini game being pressing a sequence of buttons for maximum damage, they've added a mini game of dodging telegraph. It's still very much a mini game, and one that has you staring at the ground, not your character.
I love this game, but I look forward to minimalism addons and a necessary clawback of some of the most tedious points of the game (kill those things over there! By the way each one will get you 2 percent, less if someone else touches it.)"

WildStar Open Beta Impressions

Source from:http://www.wscredits.com/news/game-WildStar-1614/WildStar-Open-Beta-Impressions-11618


WildStar, Carbine Studio's cartoony Sci-fantasy MMO, feels like it's been in development for ages - but with less than a month until launch, the game has entered Open Beta. I created my finest cat-rabbit-man-thing, slapped on a pair of magic blaster pistols and headed to Planet Nexus. Does it live up to the hype?



First things first with MMO, character creation - and WildStar offers a pretty robust suite of customisation choices that really emphasises the strengths of its character art. It's largely template-based, except for facial details which can be customised even further with a suite of sliders for everything from eye socket spacing to chin depth. It's a genuine shame that this level of granularity isn't applied to the other customisation features (everything else relies on a handful for preset template options - and they can vary between races and gender. I don't know if it's just beta limitations or otherwise, but there were more customisation options for Aurin males than there were for Aurin females, for example), but on the whole WildStar still feels like you're crafting your own avatar rather than simply picking a mix of pre-made parts.



And here's mine - Teyran, the Aurin Spellslinger. Races like WoW's Worgen and FFXIV's Miqo'te have long engendered me to the 'anthropomorphised animal' race trope, so naturally I had to pick the hippy prettyboy (or pretty girls, I'm all for equal opportunity prettiness) Aurin. Spellslingers, who can be DPSers or healers, are basically magic Han Solos - so what's not to love? On to Nexus!



Considering you'll be spending most of your time there, it helps that Nexus is a brilliantly realised world. WildStar's zany cartoon art style is utilised excellent, creating a varied environment bursting with colour - but Nexus is a compelling environment beyond its art. It feels like, unlike so many other themepark MMOs, a living world. Yes, there's still your relatively linear path through a zone, but it's all connected and sprawling and teeming with life, hostile or otherwise. Bodies of water have currents you have to fight against to cross them. There are natural hazards to contend with, like swarms of flies or poisonous clouds in swamplands, or forest fires after a certain area comes under enemy attack. The night part of the day-night cycle actually feels dark enough to be night, unlike a certain other MMO, as this picture of me leaping around this floating treescape can attest:



It's little things, but they come together in going a long, long way to selling Nexus as a world, not just the canvas for your gameplay experience.

A shame then, that so far at least the Questing content of WildStar is nothing new.



I've heard talk that the Open Beta has locked out some of the earlier main-story content, I can't confirm that, but even with the interesting idea of having 3 separate narrative arcs in questing - a localised Region Story, a larger Zone Story linking those Region Stories together, and then the all-encompassing World Story, each made up of smaller quest chains - you're still doing the exact same sort of stuff you've been doing in MMOs for decades: Go here, Collect/Kill/Interact with X things, and Robert's your father's brother, have some XP and some loot. WildStar tries to hide its 20 Bear Butts nature by marking objectives out in percentages, but that's just a poor attempt at cover up - whether you've destroyed 75% of the weapon racks or 9 of 12 racks, it's the exact same thing. It almost feels worse that they're trying to hide it like that, and it was pretty boring from the get-go. Consensus seems to be that post-level 20 (I'm 16 as of writing) the questing becomes more interesting, but when your player base is advocating almost half of the levelling experience being a boring slog, it's a bit of a problem. At least some quests allow you to use your communicator to complete them, rather than having to trek back to the quest giver in person!



But back to some more positive thoughts - at least WildStar's relatively rote questing system chucks you into a ton of the game's exciting combat mechanics, perhaps one of its biggest draws. Like the poster child for the action MMO before it, Guild Wars 2, WildStar's combat focuses on active player input and ability dodging over dice rolls. There's no such thing as an auto-attack, or white damage as it's known in MMO parlance, all your damage comes from the activation of your abilities - and even more importantly, the aiming of them. As you can see above, every attack (including your enemies) has its own telegraphed area of effect - whether that's a tight column, a wide cone, a circle or any other kind of shaped - where the ability will 'hit'. This weighting towards telegraphed attacks also means you can dodge almost every attack your enemies make (you're quite sprightly too, thanks to the ability to roll in any direction with a double tap of a movement key), but at the same time your enemies can avoid your own attacks if you're not aiming them correctly. It's a bit more active than just locking onto a target and tapping out your rotation (although there is an option in the menus that allows you to automatically face opponents when using an ability - but after being used to the default aiming technique, it felt a little clunky and restrictive), and creates a fast, frenetic bit of engagement that's hard to criticise. I've yet to see how such a freeform combat system works in the tighter environments of something like instanced dungeon content or a raid that will make up WildStar's 'Elder Game' content, but for soloing at least it feels fresh and exciting.



My most recent travels have brought me to my faction's Captial city, Thayd, and unlocked access to one of WildStar's other big selling points: Player Housing. At first, you don't have much:



But after a few quick clicks in the game's easy-to-manage Editor interface, this unfinished pile of bricks and dirts became quite the little Homestead!



Apart from your house at the heart of your plot, each of the other six sections of your floating chunk of property can be used to build plots that aid your journey on Nexus - my plots, for example, feature a vending machine that I can purchase health consumables from, a garden to plant seeds for flowers or food, a small mining excavation to gather crafting materials, and then a quaint little BBQ area to rustle up some food if I ever get into the Culinarian tradeskill. It's not just the exterior that you can mess around with too - I ended up spending most of the scraps of gold I'd acquired early on in the game to begin turning my little house into a home:



It's not much, but hey, I'm only just starting out on my adventure. Gotta live lean, and all that. The interior decoration aspect of player housing has an almost Sims-like addictive quality to it - you can tweak, scale, rotate and place all the décor you purchase or acquire during your time on Nexus by hand, allowing you to fine tune everything from the carefully placed stack of books you can just about make out in Teyran's lounge area, to the size of that frankly still humongous wedge of cheese on my kitchen table. You can't really do too much with the housing stuff when you unlock it at level 15, mainly because you don't have the cash to be decking out massive houses with lavish gear, but it's a fun, quaint little side-project to all your questing and fighting that gives the game a nice bit of causal-play to it outside of the strict progressions of PvE and PvP - and I believe you'll be able to invite other players to your housing plot too, so they can marvel at your own landscaping skills. Or just watch you chill out on your bed, earning rested EXP. All that questing is tiresome work!



So it's so far, so good for WildStar. Whilst there's a twinge of disappointment that it's yet another traditional themepark MMO in a market crammed to the gills with them, even with the little that I've played during this beta so far attests to it being at the very least a vibrant, well polished one. Time will tell if their subscription approach (it's monthly fee, but you can buy and sell subscription time in-game with your virtual money) and things like the coveted end-game content will play out - and whilst I don't think I'll be continuing with it beyond the Open Beta, WildStar seems for all intents and purposes to being a pretty solid, enjoyable MMO experience.

WildStar hits stores on June 3rd, but if you're interested in trying it out for yourself, the 10-day Open beta is currently running until May 18th - you can get access to it here.

The Character creation in WildStar

Source from:http://www.wscredits.com/news/game-WildStar-1614/The-Character-creation-in-WildStar-11601
Character creation in Wildstar is rather simple, because you don't choose any skills and don't distribute any points.




Choose of nationality and race
After clicking on "Create a New Character" you will be transferred to the window of creation. First of all, you have to decide what nations you want to play. You can choose between:
Exile - who are rebellions and want to create their new home at Nexus.
Dominion - they rule over half of a galaxy and are technologically advanced.

It's even more important, because you choose the side for once and all. Of course, Exile characters begin the game in one place and Dominion ones in the other one.Then you choose a race. Races don't give you any bonuses to statistics or skills, but each of them has inscribed several classes from which you can choose. Each fraction has four playable races, which differ mostly visually.

Races and range of classes are presented below:
Exile:
Human – Esper, Medic, Spellslinger, Warrior, Engineer, Stalker
Aurin – Esper, Spellslinger, Stalker
Granok – Medic, Warrior, Engineer
Mordesh – Medic, Spellslinger, Warrior, Engineer, Stalker

Dominion:
Cassian – Esper, Medic, Spellslinger, Warrior, Engineer, Stalker
Chua – Esper, Medic, Spellslinger, Engineer
Mechari – Medic, Warrior, Engineer, Stalker
Draken – Spellslinger, Warrior, Stalker

Choose of a class and path
After choosing race you will choose the class. Depending on the choice of race, you have a limited range of classes. It means that you can't be an Aurin warrior because publishers blocked this class (human can take all classes).

But publishers make it in a way so each character can play one of two functions. Everyone can be DPS, which means dealing huge amount of damage. Three classes may be tank and three are for healers.Possible tanks:1.Warrior 2.Engineer 3.Stalker;Possible healers:1.Medic 2.Spellslinger 3.Esper

Another window is a choice of your character's Path. You have four possibilities (more information in the chapter "Paths"):1)Soldier 2)Settler 3)Scientist 4)Explorer




The last step is to choose how you character looks like. In most of options you can choose one of available options of ears, skin color and hairs. After that you can finally click "Accept", name your hero and enter the world of the game.

Different currencies are featuring in WildStar

Source from:http://www.wscredits.com/news/game-WildStar-1614/Different-currencies-are-featuring-in-WildStar-11296
Unlike other MMOs,WildStar features several different types of Currencies, which can be used to purchase items from players or NPCs. The standard currency in WildStar is gold, which is used to purchase mundane items. This is also the primary currency that players will use when interacting with one another during Trading or on the Auction House or Commodity Exchange.



WildStar will also feature several alternative currencies that are used for specialized purchases.
1.Renown
Renown is WildStar's social currency. Renown is earned whenever a player completes a task in a group, such as questing, completing a dungeon, or killing a world boss. Renown is primarily spent on improving one's house and purchasing furniture, but there are also combat-related ways to spend it, such as Flasks.

2.Elder Gems
The endgame currency for WildStar, Elder Gems are a resource that can be earned by completing Elder Game content, such as hard mode instances, or raids. This currency will likely be spent on high-level items, such as weapons, armor, and other PvE goods.

3.Influence
Influence is a currency that is earned and kept by a guild. Influence is earned by a guild when it's members work together, and can be spent on temporary buffs, guild bank vaults, and guild-wide items

The preview of Warrior in WildStar

Source from:http://www.wscredits.com/news/game-WildStar-1614/The-preview-of-Warrior-in-WildStar-11295
It’s time to unleash the People’s Eyebrow of classes. He prefers to be known as The Warrior.The Warrior is a close-range, brute-force brawler that uses high-tech weaponry and atomic energy to close distances, generate threat, and bring the damages. He’s kind of a nuclear-powered Swiss Army knife attached to a pro wrestler.



The Warrior comes fully-loaded with a giant power sword, heavy armor, brute force and a cannon.It has a power sword and he uses it to smash through anything that gets in his way. Now, a Warrior’s arm cannon can do a little bit of everything; shoot this fool, grapple that guy, power-saw this thing, water some flowers. He also has our favorite moves from 1980s wrestling.

The warrior equip with heavy armor. Thanks to limited action set, the warrior can be a straight-up tank or go balls-to-the-wall damage. Maybe a healthy dose of both?So that’s the Warrior. Get your eyeballs over to the website and and read when we have more update on this class.

Ability Resources: The warrior makes use of huge sword and powerful tech armor to destroy his enemies. He is tough and rough. Since the warrior uses bulky arms and ammunition in combat, a lot of energy will be expended in carrying his two-handed massive sword and heavy armor in the battlefield.Kinetic energy is the ability resource available to the warrior. While abilities such as relentless strikes build up the kinetic energy level of the warrior, abilities like power strikes consume the kinetic energy of a player. At the beginning of a game, the player has no kinetic energy. However, he builds up his kinetic energy level during combat with powerful abilities like relentless strikes.

Innate Abilities: The innate abilities for the warrior called “stance” which could be seperated to two types:the bulwark and juggernaut. When activated, the bulwark protects the warrior from incoming damage and prevents the kinetic energy reserves of the player from decreasing for about 8 seconds. The bulwark raises the threat generation level of the player by 150 percent.The juggernaut is another powerful stance of the warrior that increases assault power by 33 percent and reduces all forms of resistance by 20 percent. To activate the juggernaut, the player has to trigger the overhead drive for about 6 seconds.

How PvP works in WildStar

PvE is a staple of MMORPG gameplay, but if you prefer the challenge and adrenaline rush of fighting against another human being while bashing on a keyboard and circle-strafing to dizzying effect, then you, my friend, are a PvPer. And if you've PvPed in other games, you'll be familiar with WildStar's battlegrounds and arenas. But warplots? What's a warplot? That's just one of the PvP-related questions I asked at a press event last week at Carbine Studios with the WildStar team.

Battlegrounds Designer Kevin Lee and Lead PvP Designer Jen Gordy explained to me that PvP is one of the key focuses of the game; all PvP content in WildStar will be on a cross-realm queue. Your level and gear stats will be normalized to provide an equal playing field. WildStar's telegraph system ensures that PvP is extremely reactive, which is typical, but what's not typical is being able to see where your enemy is aiming that AoE or conal attack.

I learned that there are three types of PvP players can participate in (other than open-world PvP on a server with that ruleset). The three types are meant to cater to different playstyles and as such have varying degrees of difficulty and loot rewards. Battlegrounds are meant to be fun and competitive but a bit more relaxed than the other two. Arenas ratchet up the competitiveness by having both rated and open modes. And warplots are meant to be PvP raid encounters consisting of 40 people per side. Yep: 40!

Battlegrounds
You can start queueing up for the Walatiki Temple battleground once you hit level 6. I asked whether a player can level all the way to endgame in PvP, to which Gordy emphatically replied, "Yes!" I also wondered whether that meant PvP-only players would fall behind the economy curve since PvP in many MMOs fails to provide much in the way of cash rewards and gear acquisition. Gordy assured us that the team is looking at optimizing all aspects of the system to ensure it's a truly viable option for progression, which suggests that PvP isn't something that's just being tacked onto the game.

Specifically, Gordy mentioned that the game will reward PvPers with gear and weapons at various intervals as they level up and acquire Prestige, the currency we earn by being in range of an enemy kill. Landing the killing blow will offer a slight bonus to Prestige earned, but aside from that, everyone in range will earn equal amounts of Prestige whether he's dealing damage, healing, tanking, or crowd controlling. You also earn Prestige by completing objectives like capturing masks in Walatiki Temple, for example. Once you reach level 50, you're not normalized by level (since everyone's 50); instead, you'll be matched by gear score.

Arenas
You can start queueing for Arenas at level 30, but only for open arenas. At level 50, you're able to also queue for rated arenas. Arenas come in three flavors: 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5. You can have three players on a 2v2 team, five players on a 3v3 team, and nine players on a 5v5 team (confused yet?). You are matched against other teams based on your Elo rating, which WildStar has adopted for PvP. These types of matches allow a limited number of respawns, which makes them more strategic (for example, players are forced to focus-down certain high-priority targets).

Warplots
When warplots were first explained to me, the words "defensive RTS" sprang to mind, but after seeing them in action and getting to play them, I think it's more complicated than that -- think of it as a PvP raid with MOBA elements. Warplots are level 50 content that will require 40 people on each side. These 40 people can be one guild, one alliance, several groups banded together, and so forth. Each side is called a war party. If a war party doesn't have the required 40, it can supplement with mercenaries, solo players who queue in to fill in gaps, though a war party can hold more than 40 people to accommodate backups and overflow. The leader on each side can assign permissions and ranks to allow members to control and accomplish various tasks. Even better, you're not restricted to straight-up Exile vs. Dominion matchups; you can even fight your own faction, Exile vs. Exile and Dominion vs. Dominion.

As the war party leader, you start off by setting up your warplot and adding members to your war party, all while offline (not queued up). Once you're done with the setup process, then you queue into a warplot. Your warplot is, in essence, your home base, but with a twist. Each warplot consists of seven plugs, just like the plugs in the housing system that let you build your home territory. In warplots, you can add everything from a horde of locusts to a mean-looking piranha to a passive buff. It's all completely customizable, modifiable, and upgradeable; in fact, you can upgrade each plug up to three times, though the upgrades are only match-specific. After sustaining damage, the plugs can be repaired in-match or while you're offline. Each base plug has several variants, so there's a total of roughly 120 different plugs to choose from.

Competitive players need to know that there are two win scenarios in warplots. One is the destruction of all of your enemy's generators. The second is the whittling down of your enemy's energy pool to zero. Each plug you install drains energy from your warplot, so the longer the match lasts, the more of your own energy is being drained. The different plugs drain energy at different rates depending on size, and there's no match timer, so energy pool reduction functions as a "soft" match timer. War parties will have ratings as they win or lose matches in order to provide fair match-making, and they'll also earn currency, called war coins, every match; these are used to purchase plugs and other upgrades like boss tokens.

What are boss tokens? They allow you to place as one of your plugs a raid boss, which can either sit back and defend your warplot or head out into the enemy's ranks to demolish the opposition. These bosses possess the full skillset of the bosses they're representing. At launch, there will be three purchasable boss tokens, but they will also drop (rarely) from boss mobs within the game, and those tokens will be tradeable on the auction house and buyable even if you aren't into PvP.

One luxury WildStar won't have is a spectator mode, although Gordy mentioned that the team is working on Twitch integration.

Look at WildStar's crafting mechanics

As WildStar nears its ambiguous-but-soon release date, questions have to be asked, aside from "when isthis game releasing, anyway?" Like crafting-related questions. Why haven't we heard more about crafting yet? What are the mechanics? Is this another example of a game wherein crafting is just a matter of assembling a pile of materials and clicking a button?

The answer to that last one is a pretty firm no. As it happens, there's a lot going on under the hood ofWildStar's crafting mechanics, enough to intrigue dedicated crafters of many styles.

We had a chance recently to sit down with system designer Phillip Chan to talk in-depth about the game's crafting mechanics and how the team is working to keep crafting relevant through the whole game, from start to finish. The goals were to create crafting mechanics that rewarded players for taking part, gave room for custom creations and specialized crafters, and to make the whole thing feel fun. The net result? Not just clicking a button and going off to make a sandwich.

Crafting professions are divided into two types. The first type utilizes circuit board crafting, which is for weapons, armor, and other equipment. All players can customize the stat layout of their items to a limited extent, but circuit board crafting allows the crafter to control the entire schematic, where stats go in the item, balancing out the power needs of the item with the stats being slotted in. Someone crafting a sword could provide much more specialized stats than would be found on a dropped sword, for example -- especially if the crafter opted to overcharge the item.

Overcharging is meant to be a way for crafters to push the strength of an item by introducing a chance of failure, upping power while having a chance at losing the materials and failing the craft. Currently, the ceiling for failure chance is at 30%, but it may increase in the future. No one will ever be forced to overcharge an item, but those who do will be rewarded with more powerful results.

The other major crafting type uses coordinate crafting, which is used for housing items, consumables, and so forth. A Cartesian coordinate grid is displayed, with a handful of points displayed on the grid. Players have three tries to try and move the craft from the starting point to one of the alternate points on the grid, each of which produces a variant on the core schematic. So instead of producing a single-shot healing item, a player could produce one with a heal-over-time effect, or a bloom-style effect with smaller healing over time followed by a big heal at the end.

In both cases, the standard result for a craft isn't meant to be bad. If you don't manage to hit an alternate target during coordinate crafting, you still wind up with the base item. Some of the alternative targets are strictly better than the base item, restoring more health; others are simply flavorful shifts that aren't better, just different. But you're never forced to churn out the same item, over and over, with no space for actual gameplay.

The tech tree is meant to contribute to that. Each craft has its own specific tech tree, with a series of boxes that each contains a task, like "Craft seven healing doodads" or "Build two swords with Attack +10" and points related. (These are simply examples, obviously.) Completing these points on the tech tree rewards players with new recipes. You don't have to complete the tech tree, but the goal is that you don't level crafting simply by assembling a huge stack of materials, clicking the craft button, and then getting up from the computer to go have lunch.

Dedicated crafters also won't be producing the same thing as other dedicated crafters with the same profession thanks to the crafting talent trees. Yes, as you level a craft you get to invest points in crafting talents, diversifying your abilities and allowing you to make even better items in your chosen field than non-specialists. A generic weaponcrafter could build an overcharged sword, for instance, but a dedicated swordsmith could overcharge it further and more efficiently, adding extra stats and even special effects that normally wouldn't be possible.

So how much will all of this matter at endgame? According to Chan, that's still under heavy discussion. At this point everything is tradeable between players -- the goal is an active economy, and that requires crafters who can specialize and trade with others. Where crafted items fall in relation to endgame equipment is still being discussed and tweaked, but the goal has always been that you should be rewarded for taking part in crafting, and that means producing useful stuff at all tiers of gameplay.

Chan also stressed that crafting isn't an afterthought in leveling, either. Schematics exist across the world that are aimed toward what you're doing, so taking part in PvP combat will yield more PvP-related recipes. You also have access to work orders in each major settlement, more incentive to craft a few specific items rather than just mass-producing whatever requires the smallest amount of material.

As it stands now, it seems that crafting will be a fairly major component of WildStar -- not a mandatory one, but something useful from the start of the game into the endgame. Which means you'd better start thinking about how you'd like to specialize your developments. (We recommend specializing in high-quality furnishings. Everyone always needs chairs.)

WildStar's greatest opponent

Your real opponent is pretty much always yourself.

I could spend the next several years of my writing career trying to be a better writer than, say, Justin Olivetti. I'd fail, for starters, because look at the guy. But even if I could succeed, I'd never be living up to my potential. I'll always be the guy trying to be better than the last thing Justin wrote, never coming up with my own things, never really advancing myself. The only way to be truly good is to try to be the best writer I can be, regardless of who else is out there.

What does this have to do with WildStar? Simple. I mention other games here, other releases looking at the same window, but WildStar doesn't need to be better than those games, up to and including The Elder Scrolls Online. WildStar needs to be the best version of itself that it can be. Its only real opponent is itself, not other titles.


The fan wars have, of course, already begun. The debates rage in comments and in forums about how WildStar and The Elder Scrolls Online will be going head-to-head in the arena of 2014.Who will win?

Well, World of Warcraft will win. It's spent a lot of time winning, and it's a firm enough establishment that even if a game launched tomorrow that could actually be the Next Big Thing, it would still be several years before it actually mattered. So if you're really concerned about the whole "which game wins" nonsense, then there's your winner.

But that misses a fundamental point, which is who cares. This isn't football. One team doesn't win while the other one loses. It's entirely possible for both games to launch this year to rave reviews and solid subscription numbers, and it's entirely possible for both to launch and flop badly. I doubt that will happen withWildStar, but I'm well aware that the game could launch and then become the next Warhammer Online in a matter of weeks,regardless of ESO's fortunes.

Oh, are we judging just based on reviews? Because that has problems too.

This isn't a situation in which every MMO player is sitting around choosing between one or the other, nor is it even a case in which most of the people who will play one or the other are somehow undecided. That guy showing up in the comments to say how the game will never stand up to ESO? Yeah, nothing you say is going to convince him to play WildStar. His choice is made. And that's fine, good for you, glad you know what you want, guy. Have fun.

What I want from WildStar is a series of updates. I want ongoing stuff to do in all the arenas of the game. I want to have fun playing it. I want it to be around for a long while. And pretty much all of that depends on the quality of the game that Carbine Studios releases and the marketing done to promote that game. Produce a solid game that isn't riddled with bugs and enormous issues surrounding the central gameplay along with reasonable forecasts for subscriber numbers, and I can see the game being profitable enough to just keep humming along.


At that point, seriously, I don't care. Does it have 10,000 subscribers? 50,000? 5 million? Whatever. If I've got people to play with no fear that the game is going to go down some idle Friday never to come back, I'm good. (Not that subscribers are even necessarily indicative of that, as we've found out many times over the years.)

Do I think WildStar will have the staying power to entrance people over ESO in the long term? I don't think that's an actual problem. I think WildStar needs to have staying power to convince people to stay long-term, and there are so many MMOs out there that no one is wanting for options. Trying to develop that staying power specifically by looking at what ESO is doing doesn't produce a game that stands on its own merits; neither does producing a game specifically meant to counter what World of Warcraft is doing or Star Trek Online or any game you can think of.

We're talking about a game that isn't out yet that is launching into an astonishingly rich environment. There are more different sorts of games out there than even existed in the past. Wurm Onlineand Neverwinter are two games that could not be more different than one another, and they both are part of the same overall genre, doing their own things. The greater risk is fading into the background and becoming uniform.

So I don't put any stock in the whole back-and-forth of asking which game is going to "win" during this year. It doesn't matter. Sure, a smart business strategy takes into account the launch dates of other games, but WildStar's biggest development goal has to be about being awesome on its own merits. I don't want WildStar to "beat" ESO. I want it to launch and be fun to play, and I want it to keep going for a long while.

Fortunately for me, the game seems to be providing me lots of compelling reasons to play. So I think we're good.

As always, feedback is welcome down in the comment section below. the week after that, I'm going to dive back into lore and talk about the factional conflict as a whole, having looked at every playable race at this point.

Unveils the Esper again in WildStar

While WildStar kicked off its class re-reveals with the most physical class possible, the Esper is the exact opposite. It's all about mind games. Of course, when you're talking about a powerful telekinetic and telepathic dynamo of illusions and mental weaponry, "mind games" still involves blowing things to pieces with remarkable alacrity. So perhaps it's not quite as much of an opposite as you might think from a quick glance.

The Esper isn't just about creating various telekinetic blades to slice apart foes from afar, of course -- the class can also heal, crowd control, and even move around quickly through various mental abilities. It's a good thing, too, since the class is also limited to light armor and doesn't do well under pressure from a concentrated physical assault. Take a look at the new video past the cut for a better picture of this mental dynamo in action, complete with that golden armor buff you've seen from several screenshots in the past.

Latest AMA features the Warrior in WildStar

Carbine hosted an AMA session earlier today focused on the Warrior class for its upcoming WildStar MMO. Representing the dev team was lead combat designer Chris Lynch, class lead Hugh Shelton, Warrior class designer Marc Matzenbacher, and senior community manager David Bass.

The talk ranged from protective abilities to taunts to underwater and zero gravity gameplay situations. If you're interested in more Warrior-centric info, you can read the whole AMA via the links below. And don't forget about Carbine's Warrior livestream on November 9th at 3:00 p.m. EST.